Adverse Selection and Switching Costs in Health Insurance Markets: When Nudging Hurts

I especially thank my dissertation committee chairs Igal Hendel and Michael Whinston for their guidance on this project. My third committee member, David Dranove, provided invaluable advice throughout the research process. I would like to thank conference discussants Gautam Gowrisankaran, Jon Gruber, Amanda Kowalski, and Bob Town for their advice and effort. This work has benefited particularly from the extensive comments of Severin Borenstein, Leemore Dafny, J.P. Dube, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Craig Garthwaite, Ron Goettler, Kate Ho, Mitch Hoffman, Kei Kawai, Jon Kolstad, Jon Levin, Neale Mahoney, Kanishka Misra, Aviv Nevo, Mallesh Pai, Ariel Pakes, Rob Porter, James Roberts, Bill Rogerson, Steve Tadelis, and Glen Weyl. I have received invaluable advice from numerous others including my colleagues at Berkeley and Northwestern as well as seminar participants at the 2011 AEA Meetings, ASHE-Cornell, the Bates White Antitrust Conference, Berkeley, Booth School of Business, CalTech, Columbia, the Cowles Structural Microeconomics Conference, EUI, Haas School of Business, Harvard, Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School, the HEC Montreal Health-IO Conference, the Milton Friedman Institute Health Economics Conference, M.I.T., Microsoft Research, Northwestern, Olin School of Business, Princeton, Sloan School of Management, Stanford Business School, Toulouse School of Economics, UCSD, UC-Davis, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Warwick, Yale and Yale SOM. I gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization (CSIO) at Northwestern and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.